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Blackboard has been successfully upgraded, and you can now log in again.

For those of you who like to know such things, we are now on Blackboard 9.1, Q2 2019 release, Cumulative Update 2.

You will notice little change in the new release, but it incorporates over 200 bug fixes, and there are additional behind-the-scenes changes designed to improve security and performance.

One change which will be more apparent to students is that – because we use the UK English language pack – when they access the ‘My Grades’ screen this now appears as ‘My Marks’.

This does not automatically change the name of the link on your course menu, but before the start of term we plan to ask Blackboard to update the ‘My Grades’ link on all 2019-20 courses to ‘My Marks and Feedback’. We will keep you updated on this and other enhancements introduced over the summer.

Students will see the course listed as AP3A103-19-0A Horticultural Crop Technology (2019/20)
or AP3A105-19-0A Global Issues in Nutrition and Health (2019/20)

but will in fact all be accessing the merged course.

Staff Enrolments

Module Convenors: you are probably seeing rather more courses at the moment than you would like. For instance if you are the module convenor for AB1XYZ you are probably seeing 2 courses, AB1XYZ-19-0A and AB1XYZ-19-0MOD.

The former will be shown as (unavailable – Child course of AB1XYZ-19-0MOD) and can be ignored. IT will look at removing these redundant enrolments – you need take no action.

Student Enrolments

RISIS switches to the new academic year on 1st August, and student enrolments for 2019-20 courses will start to flow through to Blackboard shortly afterwards – probably in the week beginning 5th August.

The exam feedback is being provided to students through Blackboard. To facilitate this and ensure consistency in how the feedback is made available, a new menu area has been automatically added to the Blackboard coursesfor all 2018-19 modules.

Colleagues from the Programme Administration teams will be working with Module Convenors to populate this new area with the correct content.

The area is labelled ‘Past Exam Papers and Feedback‘.

By default, this area appears at the bottom of the course menu.

You can easily move it to a different position, so that it sits with other assessment-related menu items, by dragging and dropping it.

What do I need to do if my Blackboard course does not have the new menu area?

All Blackboard courses for single RISIS modules, and all Merged courses will have the new menu area added automatically. If your course is in a different category, you can still provide exam feedback but need to add the menu area manually. You can do this by adding a new content area to your course menu.